Ku Klux Klan

THE FIRST KU Klux Klan, founded in 1866 and surviving barely into the 1870s, was not primarily a political organization. While it opposed the Republican Party, it did so because of that party's association with the Union and Reconstruction, and though it had political aims, it did not have any real effect on the elections of the period. The exception would be the Klan's use of violence: it prevented southern Republicans from going to the polls, or forced them to vote for Democrats under threat of assault. The second Ku Klux Klan, on the other hand, was formed during the nadir of American race relations, in response to the glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1915 movie Birth of a Nation.

This second Klan responded to the growing anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant sentiments, just as the first Klan had responded to the resentments of Reconstruction and the failed secession. This Klan organized in Georgia and recruited across the nation at a time when benign fraternal clubs such as the Knights of Columbus were popular, and operated on a model in which both the local organizer and the national organization profited. Unlike the original Klan, the second Klan was well organized, with a membership in the millions in the 1920s, most of them in the midwest. Across the south and midwest, state and local politicians were elected who were members of the Klan or whose supporters included many Klansmen. Klansman Edward lackson was even elected governor of Indiana in 1924 on the Republican Party ticket, and appointed fellow Klansmen to prominent positions, as well as endorsing Klansmen candidates in other elections.

That same year, the Klan was a powerful force at the Democratic National Convention. Governor Al Smith of New York was the party's preferred candidate, but was an Irish Catholic. The Klansmen among the southern Dixiecrats couldn't abide the notion of a Catholic president, [Page 352]and threw their support behind Smith's frontrun-ning competition, William McAdoo, the son-in-law of former President Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson's secretary of the treasury. Wilson was widely believed, by the Klan and others, to be sympathetic to the original Klan. As McAdoo and Smith split many of the votes, the virtually unknown West Virginian John Davis, an outspoken opponent of the Klan, won the nomination and lost the election. Smith won the nomination in the subsequent 1928 election, and became the only Democratic candidate between 1876 and 1948 to lose the south.

1964: Ku Klux Klan members supporting Barry Coldwater's campaign for the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention, San Francisco, California. An African-American man pushes the signs back

The Klan's power continued to grow. Its members included Hugo Black, an Alabama senator who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937 (at which point he claimed to have resigned from the Klan prior to his election to the senate), and Alabama Governor Bibb Graves, who served from 1927–31 and 1935–39, and who was elected with the support of the Klan. Graves had once been an Exalted Cyclops (a mid-level rank in Klan hierarchy), leading his Montgomery chapter. He went on to contribute to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and his supporters have often claimed that his relationship with the Klan aimed only to exploit their power base in order to gain office and make his reforms.

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